Battle of Wielbark

The Battle of Wielbark (30 July 1812) was a battle of the Napoleonic Wars. During Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812, Ludwig Froese led a Prussian army of 2,196 troops allied with France to invade the Russian Empire's lands in Poland, facing Radomir Kovshutin's 1,894 Russian troops in battle. The Prussians were easily defeated, as their troops were mostly landwehr militia; 1,910 Prussians were killed or missing, while only 356 Russians were lost.

Background
Napoleon allied with Prussia and the Austrian Empire after defeating them in the 1809 Fifth Coalition, and in 1812 he planned an invasion of the Russian Empire after they blockaded France. Napoleon's 685,000-strong Grande Armee prepared for an offensive through Poland and into the eastern borderlands of Russia. For this maneuver to work, he required the Prussians to advance north into Lithuania while the Austrians would cover his southern flank and invade Bessarabia. The 2,196-strong Prussian army of Ludwig Froese advanced north, and it met a 1,894-strong Russian army under Radomir Kovshutin at Wielbark in the present-day Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship in northeastern Poland. The two armies met on an afternoon in grassy flatlands, and the stage was set for a battle.

Battle
The Russian army had horse artillery batteries on each flank, while the Prussians had a battery of foot artillery on their left flank. The Prussians went on the offensive against the Russians, so the Russian artillery pounded their marching soldiers. After several barrages of cannonballs, the Russian artillery switched their ordinance to grapeshot, effective at close range. Several Prussian units on the right flank were routed by the sound of grapeshot, with some units having 100 men out of 120 still alive, but losing spirit. The Prussian center and right flanks met the Russian center and left, and the Russians held off their forces. Later, the Prussian right flank returned to combat, but it was again routed; the Prussian left had a success when it routed the Russian artillery in melee, but the Russian right and center flanks closed in for combat with the remaining Prussian troops. The battle ended when Kovshutin led a cavalry charge against the Prussian artillery, and all of the soldiers there were killed. The Russian army lost 356 dead, while 1,910 Prussian troops were killed, wounded, or missing in action. Wielbark was one of the few battles that Prussia fought in during the invasion of Russia, and the Prussians did not play a major role in Napoleon's invasion of Russia.